Natalie Czech
Hidden Poems
25 Aug - 09 Oct 2011
In her photographic works, Natalie Czech examines the interrelationship between text and image and explores the question of how words evoke and interpret images. She uses concepts of authorship, subjectivity, documentation and the production of contexts of meaning.
In 2010 she received the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Award for Contemporary Photography for her ongoing series, Hidden Poems. Illustrated pages from magazines, newspapers or picture books provide the raw materials for this series. Natalie Czech highlights individual letters and words in the respective texts that produce a formerly 'hidden' poem. The poems come from, among others, E.E. Cummings, Jack Kerouac and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Like a quick thought - a literary snapshot - they appear within the context of the page and rattle the 'rationally' established, coordinated text and image structure. The result is a text within the text that stimulates new meanings in dialogue with the already existing images and texts.
For the series, A Small Bouquet, produced for the Kunstverein Langenhagen, Natalie Czech uses calligrams as an attempt to confront and intertwine text and image, she reverses the process established for Hidden Poems of inscribing into an existing text structure. The source material is not pre-existing text fragments, but a picture poem. Natalie Czech invited seven writers - Andrew Berardini, Julien Bismuth, Maia Gianakos, Leslie-Ann Murray, Mick Peter, Nathania Rubin and Alix Rule - to each write a text that contains the same calligram of the American poet, Frank O'Hara (1926 - 66). The texts develop precisely around the calligram, embed it in the text flow and thereby, however, dissolve its iconicity. Natalie Czech presents the texts as photographs of book pages and re-presents the calligram through marking words in the photographs.
Natalie Czech (b. 1976) lives and works in Berlin. She has received numerous awards and scholarships, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the USA. This year her work can be seen in exhibitions at, among others, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Kunstverein Rhineland and Westphalia Kunstverein / Schaufenster, Düsseldorf and at C / O Berlin
In 2010 she received the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Award for Contemporary Photography for her ongoing series, Hidden Poems. Illustrated pages from magazines, newspapers or picture books provide the raw materials for this series. Natalie Czech highlights individual letters and words in the respective texts that produce a formerly 'hidden' poem. The poems come from, among others, E.E. Cummings, Jack Kerouac and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Like a quick thought - a literary snapshot - they appear within the context of the page and rattle the 'rationally' established, coordinated text and image structure. The result is a text within the text that stimulates new meanings in dialogue with the already existing images and texts.
For the series, A Small Bouquet, produced for the Kunstverein Langenhagen, Natalie Czech uses calligrams as an attempt to confront and intertwine text and image, she reverses the process established for Hidden Poems of inscribing into an existing text structure. The source material is not pre-existing text fragments, but a picture poem. Natalie Czech invited seven writers - Andrew Berardini, Julien Bismuth, Maia Gianakos, Leslie-Ann Murray, Mick Peter, Nathania Rubin and Alix Rule - to each write a text that contains the same calligram of the American poet, Frank O'Hara (1926 - 66). The texts develop precisely around the calligram, embed it in the text flow and thereby, however, dissolve its iconicity. Natalie Czech presents the texts as photographs of book pages and re-presents the calligram through marking words in the photographs.
Natalie Czech (b. 1976) lives and works in Berlin. She has received numerous awards and scholarships, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the USA. This year her work can be seen in exhibitions at, among others, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Kunstverein Rhineland and Westphalia Kunstverein / Schaufenster, Düsseldorf and at C / O Berlin